Peekaboo Gallery, a new experiential gallery located at 40 Mills Place in Old Pasadena, will be lifting off its second rotating exhibition, “Welcome Aboard The Friendly Skies: The Art of High Altitude Travel,” on Saturday, August 18, featuring vintage airline memorabilia and collectibles from a time when traveling aboard a luxury airliner was a magical experience.
The Golden Age of flying was a time of glamorous air hostesses and gourmet meals, when one could jaunt from New York to Paris on a supersonic three-and-a-half-hour flight while enjoying champagne and canapés to live organ accompaniment, an announcement on Peekaboo Gallery’s website said about the upcoming exhibit.
“We have curated an extraordinary exhibition of some of the most sought-after airline and aviation-related collectibles in the world,” Peekaboo Gallery founder Jordan Reichek told Travel Pulse magazine. “We’ll be producing a live runway show featuring vintage crew uniforms and even have a 10-foot section of a PAN AM fuselage installed in the gallery as our official photo hub.”
“The Friendly Skies” will showcase “the finest heirlooms of 100 years of air travel in a striking Jumbo Jet stage set,” the announcement said. The exhibition, which is on until September 23, will bring together original lithographs and paintings of classic travel art, industrial and commercial aircraft models, and high-flying haute couture in a flight attendant fashion show.
The Gallery’s collection of vintage flight attendant uniforms feature some of the most fashionable styles of the 1940s through the 1990s, used by crews on PAN AM, Braniff Airways, TWA, United, Eastern, British Airways and even the Soviet Aeroflot. The exhibit will also display branded travel bags and luggage tags, airline signage, aviation equipment, and rare travel posters from the various airline companies.
A large model of the 1970s Concorde Supersonic will also be on display, as well as a TWA Constellation travel agency model, a nine-foot porcelain sky-stairs sign from Eastern Airlines in the 1950s, an original 1970 PETER MAX Pan Am 747 silkscreen poster, and original Delta Airlines travel poster production paintings, says Travel Pulse.
“This presentation of collectible airline memorabilia is unprecedented in a fine art setting,” Matt Kennedy, Gallery Director, tells the magazine. “With this show, as with all of our shows, we aim to showcase the best of the genre to an audience that may have never known that collecting was an option. I look forward to introducing the next generation to the treasures of our pop culture past.”
As part of the exhibit, Peekaboo Gallery has arranged with the Air Hollywood film studio where guests can literally travel back in time and dine first-class aboard a PAN AM 747 Clipper jumbo Jet.
Peekaboo Gallery, a fresh concept in the curation, exhibition and sale of exceptional antiques and collectible memorabilia, opened in May and offers visitors an “unabashed celebration of that most fantastic, turbulent and innovative period in history known as the Twentieth Century.”
The Gallery is located in a classic brick building erected in 1886 that was central to one of Southern California’s first commercial districts. The space was once home to the groundbreaking Medenhall-Sobieski Gallery.
Reichek, the Gallery’s founder, is a 30-year veteran producer/director in the animation industry and was also a rabid gatherer of everything vintage pop-culture. His sizeable collections included records, furniture, automobiles, illustration art, clothing, posters, coin-op, ephemera, comics, and advertising. His two most passionate areas of collecting have been vintage commercial Tiki décor and memorabilia from Walt Disney’s first theme park, Disneyland.
With Peekaboo Gallery, Reichek offers the veteran and novice, hunters and browsers, a museum-style, theatrical experience where the showcased subject matter alternates on a regular basis. Every two months, the featured collection of vintage memorabilia on offer changes as does its dramatic, experiential presentation.
For more information on Peekaboo Gallery, visit www.peekaboogallery.com.
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